Role of race, class, and gender in criminal justice policy development Research Paper

Role of race, class, and gender in criminal justice policy development - Research Paper Example Criminologists have also developed a substantial literature examining sex effects, and there has been some attention to the class-based nature of court decisions. Most studies emphasize only one of these dimensions at a time, however, and generally they focus solely on the defendant. Nevertheless, a few researchers have developed more complex analyses of the subtle and dynamic ways in which race, gender, and class converge. Sex and gender are sometimes used interchangeably. As I use these terms, sex refers to the classification of people as men or women on the basis of biological criteria; gender refers to socially learned aspects of human identity. Thus, gender is not simply a category, attribution, or role, it is a dynamic process of constructing particular ways of being masculine or feminine (see similarly Martin and Jurik 1996). Gender was largely ignored by criminologists until the late 1970s and 1980s, and even then attention spotlighted sex differences in crime commission and sanctioning rather than questioning the gendered nature of crimes by men and of the criminal justice system’s response to men’s crimes (Daly and Chesney-Lind 1988; Simpson 1989). Nevertheless, a growing body of scholarship has coalesced around the question of sex differences in sentencing. This research examines whether sex differences exist, how gender conditions leniency, and why sex differences arise. The first question concerns whether sex differences arise. The most comprehensive recent summary of this research is provided by Daly and Bordt (1995). They analyzed published findings from 50 court datasets to assess whether significant sex differences favoring women were related to the statistical procedures used, court contexts, sample composition (including race), and how the research was conceptualized (e.g., gend er focused or not). Approximately half of the